The Milky Way over Cerro Armazones

Nighttime photograph of the ESO Astronomical Site Monitor on Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Atacama Desert. Located about 20 km away from Cerro Paranal and ESO's Very Large Telescope, Cerro Armazones is the selected site for the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). Across the sky stretches the Milky Way, the plane of our own galaxy's disc seen edge-on. The centre of the galaxy is visible as a yellow bulge crossed by dark lanes to the left of the tall tower. These dark nebulae, created by the obscuring effects of cosmic dust, were the constellations seen in the ancient Andean cosmology. An example is the llama, which stretches from above the tower to the right, and whose eye is the bright star Alpha Centauri.